Basurero Writer, Director, and Producer Eileen Cabiling

Writer, Director, and Producer Eileen Cabiling discusses her creative process and her inspiration for the critically acclaimed short film Basurero.

Eric: Hi, I’m Eric Conner, senior instructor at New York Film Academy, and in this episode, we bring you a writer producer who’s worked on a number of legendary independent films, including Smoke and Welcome to the Dollhouse, before she moved over to one hundred acre wood as a writer on My Friends Tigger & Pooh. She was a recipient of the Disney Writers Fellowship and has most recently been doing the festival circuit with her award winning short Basurero, which she wrote, produced and directed. We are talking about Eileen Cabiling. Like many working filmmakers, Ms. Cabiling went to film school, but it was her time in the trenches of the 90s New York based indie film scene, which deepened her understanding of what it takes to make a project happen. 

Eileen Cabiling: I’ve worked for a lot of indie filmmakers in the 90s. I kind of yeah, I guess when I was in New York, it was kind of indie film scene. So yeah, I worked with Todd Solondz and I worked with I worked with Michael Apted, Lydia Pilcher and Forest Whitaker. I was his assistant on his first movie that he directed for HBO called Strapped. And I think Todd Solondz’s Welcome to the Dollhouse. And I worked on Buffalo 66, which is an interesting – so, yeah, I’ve worked in those fields. Yeah. I think that was very it was kind of a gift in a way to be around these filmmakers who had such strong voices and wanted to make the films that they wanted to make. Yeah, I mean, I definitely was very struck by Todd Solondz, for example. He’s such an eccentric character who really is an auteur filmmaker. And I think during that time it was a very in there still is to this day auteur filmmaking, where the films are really coming out as if it’s their own personal novel that they’re writing. And so to be around that sort of motivation and that drive is very different. Then I also I also worked as a writer for Disney where – Disney, as a writer there, you definitely want to write from a personal place when you’re given an episode to write, and I was writing for Winnie the Pooh, but they’re also very concerned about yeah audience and testing your episode. And every department gives you notes for marketing to the legal department, to the executives. So indie auteur filmmaking, you don’t really necessarily have that unless it’s already attached to a studio. So different, a whole different world. 

Eric: Yeah. Disney is a far cry from the idiosyncratic world of Welcome to the Dollhouse, which for me is one of the best indie films that come out of the 90s. And Eileen Cabiling’s own voice was further shaped by her previous work in documentaries. 

Eileen Cabiling: Well, with documentary, right before I made my film, I was working for Jigsaw on Death Row Stories and for documentary that I would say is a kind of an entertaining doc series, but very compelling and real, but almost indie film like in process. And then my film. Yes, is inspired by true events, but it’s definitely fictionalized. I think the difference obviously is with fiction, you have way more liberties to explore. And in that sense you can sometimes explore issues that perhaps weren’t part of the original situation. And with documentary, I think I mean, it depends on the kind of documentary, but you do want that integrity of it being as factual as possible. And as true to what is really there. Yeah, I guess within the doc world there are different realms of documentary. You know, like there is a documentary that a colleague made of mine out of the Philippines that’s getting a lot of attention, I think, winning a lot of great awards. And she made it mostly off of stock footage and interviews that she had made. And it’s about the Yolanda typhoon. And I think that was very creative. But it really gave you a sense of how people were affected by that typhoon. I mean, whereas something like Death Row Stories we’re actually taking cases and trying to humanize the case, you know, people who have been put on death row, they’ve been exonerated because they were never guilty. 

Eric: It took all of these work experiences to get this building ready to take on her short film Basurero. 

Eileen Cabiling: My path to this specific story was inspired by an Al Jazeera report that they were interviewing fishermen. And this one fisherman was saying that he has been on the side dumping bodies for, I guess, authorities in the current administration’s drug war. 

Clip: These waters may look peaceful, but this fisherman we’ll call Manuel says Manila Bay harbors an open secret. 

Eileen Cabiling: And how he had already dumped like 20 bodies, I believe. And then he came across a body that he had to dump of someone he knew. 

Clip: We usually throw them out in Manila Bay. Sometimes we put weights on it so it doesn’t float up. Once I saw the body of a friend. I’m scared and I wonder if I could be next. 

Al Jazeera. Manila.

Eileen Cabiling: And that really struck me, first of all, with just what’s happening in the Philippines with the killings. Just to put some context in that, Duterte the current president when he became president, two thousand sixteen, one of his big promises was to eradicate the drug problem. And so they went right into a pretty bloody drug war. And it’s definitely a human rights, human values situation where they were just – it was a killing spree at first. So for me, what really struck me about the story was it was an opportunity for me to make a short film, to work with that very specific actor who we were already planning a feature film together. And then also for me to explore the themes that I want to explore as an auteur filmmaker or stepping into auteur filmmaking after working on many other people’s films for many years. So it really gave me that space and that opportunity and also to continue my vision as a filmmaker as to what I want to speak about. I’m very interested in – I’m a bit of an activist filmmaker. Most of the work that I work on is social impact stuff. Even documentaries that I’ve worked on and such. 

Eric: The news report was only the beginning for Ms. Cabiling’s journey to understand how someone would resort to doing such a grisly job to make ends meet. 

Eileen Cabiling: Well, I went in knowing what I wanted to accomplish on the level of what I wanted to explore. You know, I really wanted to explore the question of how can a fisherman dumping bodies for survival because he needs the extra cash, how can he find self value in a world that is already not valuing certain people? So I kind of wanted to put that question out there. And that’s, I think, a question that I personally also am always putting out there. How can we have a voice if we live in a system that doesn’t support our voice, but in the intricacies of making the film in the details, making the film from writing it to working with producers to working with a cast, working with how to design it, and my DP how to tell the story. That is a very collaborative effort. And I discussed these ideas a lot with them. And then they brought their own sort of voice to the table as well, or their own sort of essence to the table. Film is such a collaborative process. It’s not like it’s just all about me, me, me. You know, I think as a director and a writer, it really is about your team coming on board with you and bringing themselves into mixing their souls into the soul of this film. 

Eric: Part of what drove Ms. Cabiling to tell this specific personal story was her own upbringing as a first generation Filipino American. 

Eileen Cabiling: I think it just came out of my own personal path, like my own personal journey has been about exploring themes for myself to help me express my own voice in the world. I grew up in the United States as a minority in Richmond, Virginia, as the only Asian kid in my class. And we grew up in a world where in movies and literature, you don’t really see yourself and your stories. So it was always a bit of a hurdle for me or a mountain for me to climb. And it is, I think, a mountain for many people of diversity to climb right now in the United States. So I’ve always just been attracted to people and their stories whose voices aren’t being heard or they’re not being represented. 

Eric: This past year might have helped change that story, to an extent. With the coronavirus pushing back several major studio releases, a diverse slate of filmmakers have now been populating the awards circuit, including Nomadland‘s Chloe Zhao, One Night in Miami‘s Regina King, and Minari‘s Lee Chung. 

Eileen Cabiling: I think I’ve noticed that a lot in the feature film world. There seem to be themes like I think right now for people of color. There’s a lot of films about immigrants and the immigrant story. Like, for example, The Farewell is about the Chinese American girl who goes to China to deal with her grandmother who’s dying and her grandmother doesn’t know she’s dying. But that’s a very American story. And my from my perspective, even though I know I think it was the Golden Globes that didn’t really see it, I think they considered it a foreign language film. 

Eric: To clarify, the Golden Globes placed the terrific Minari in American produced feature about a Korean family moving to Arkansas in the foreign language category. Now, it won, which is great, but still odd choice. 

Eileen Cabiling: In short film, you really see a lot of different kinds of films because it’s a very almost like an art gallery exhibit, they’re curating films and there’s very specific types of short film festivals. My film world premiered at the Busan International Film Festival in Korea, which is a huge film market. So, yes, most of their eyes were on the feature films, but they do showcase 10 short films and mine was one of them. And the films that I was curated with, all 10 of them were all very different, but they were all Asian films. So there was film from Azerbaijan, a film from Kazakhstan, a film from Vietnam, a film from Japan, Philippines, and thematically, they were all very, very different, actually, the themes that they were exploring. So they tend to do like social impact films, comedies, more quirky. There’s a whole experimental film. So I think the short film platform and the festivals – it’s a great way to meet all kinds of filmmakers and it’s a great way to just see all the different possibilities. 

Eric: These platforms can also help foster a sense of community. And as the saying goes, the rising tide raises all ships. 

Eileen Cabiling: Right now, it really makes a lot of sense to, for example, within the Fil-Am community, the Filipino American filmmakers, we are really supporting each other. And a couple of pioneer filmmakers like Diane Paragas and Marie Jamora, they’ve started communities and have really initiated for support so that it’s not this crab mentality to help get our stories out into the mainstream of films in the United States and globally. So I think it’s important. But yeah, of course, it would be nice to us not to have to use the word diverse. Right? Or woman or Filipino or Asian American. I mean, it would be nice to be able to just see diversity as the norm, you know, but because it’s not, I think we need constructs to help us get there. I think it’s a step by step process. 

Eric: Part of this step by step process is collaboration and mentorship, which can only help a filmmaker learn and grow provided they can accept and give honest feedback. 

Eileen Cabiling: I really recommend people when they make their films. And I did this with myself and I saw this for the filmmakers that I worked for in the past to have mentors like real mentors, not mentors who are just going to make you feel good, you know, but mentors who are going to be very honest about your work and honest about how they feel, but also mentors whose work you appreciate. So you guys know that you’re in the same field of the type of stories you like to tell and the type of characters like there’s no reason for me to have a mentor who works in a whole other field, for example, or works on a completely different kind of storytelling like voice animation or something. For me, it’s a different mindset. Unless the writer and I know his or her work resonates with my kind of work. And we have a good dialog together. But I think it’s a lifelong question. When do you know you’re done? When do you know you’re finished and when do you know it’s just ready to put out? For me, it was me really knowing my footage, trying everything. I tried everything. I also tried people’s suggestions when I was feeling confused instead of rebelling against it. Even though it sounded way out there, I went ahead and gave it a try, like we cut the film a whole different way. And then I did have people see the film and give me their honest opinions about it. I tend to like to be around people who really will tell me how it is like how they feel. But I also had to learn how to get used to being critiqued harshly. And that’s really happens to you when you work for the studios as a writer, you get critiqued left and right and you – you build a tough shell because you realize it’s not about you personally. It’s really about the work. And I think that really shows a sign of being at a certain space with yourself in your work. But it’s always going to be a little bit. Sometimes you just need to take space when you get a very harsh note or note that you just don’t understand, you know, just take space for it and just process it. And maybe a lot of times just ask questions to the person who gave that critique, because a lot of times we will hear critiques from our own traumas or our own lenses or what we’re insecure about. And it may not even be about that at all. So it’s definitely an art form. 

Eric: It’s also a balance. Listen to your own instincts, listen to others. And listening to the work itself. 

Eileen Cabiling: I’ve gone through phases in life where it was about protecting the work first. But yes, I mean, you want to protect the work and make sure. But you kind of have to trust that you’re already protecting the work by listening to the critiques and realizing that you can take some and leave the rest. You know what I mean? Take what you think works for you and works for the piece. And I like taking stuff sometimes that is completely way out there that I was like, well, that’s not what this film is all about. And I use that as an opportunity to practice asking questions, to learn how to confront critique that might be uncomfortable because again, it’s a collaborative process, storytelling. And it also it helps me learn to get to know my own story because I think we learn our stories as we make the piece all the way until when you’re showing it out in the world, all through the editing process, the writing, the shooting, casting, you learn about your characters more when you’re casting as well. And you have that actor in front of you, you know, bringing himself to the table and his ideas. 

Eric: Ms. Cabiling cites director Andrea Arnold’s approach to American Honey as an inspiration for how to deeply connect with a project to make it truly authentic. 

Eileen Cabiling: I really love Andrea Arnold’s process. I know that she had an essence of a story or an idea of story with the article that she had read about kids that were selling magazines around the US. And but then she just went traveling around the US and wrote the story that way, physically going to these locations, spaces and finding her actors on the beach in Florida. And just I work that way as well. Like I believe that as I step forward, the story will come to life and make sense. So as I start putting ideas on the page or for example, with Basurero, this short film, I definitely started shifting things as I was visiting the fisherman and hanging out with fishermen and also visiting where they live and and then also envisioning the day of the fisherman, you know, moving through the slums and going into the nightclubs at night where they hang out. And I think it’s a very organic process. So, yeah, I mean, I know in writing, for example, in the training of writing, you know, a lot of times there’s tools to try to get to the drama of it. Right. So what’s the irony in your logline and what’s his problem and what does he want? And that’s all very important to have. But sometimes also you want to feel your story. You want to feel it out and organically let it hit the page. And a lot of times those questions will be answered. But it’s really about finding your own process and then just trusting yourself. It’s perseverance to not giving up. 

Eric: And part of that perseverance is dealing with the inevitable problems that will arise on even the most well-organized production. 

Eileen Cabiling: When you’re on the set, as you know, you have time constraints and budget constraints like you have to finish your day or else everyone will get pissed off at you or you’ll go into overtime where everyone will be, like, not know what they’re doing because you haven’t made a decision. What I do is, well, with shooting. What I’ve done is I just again, go in knowing the scene that I’m shooting, having a plan. I mean, being super prepared. As you know, a director has to be super prepared for any because if you have a very clear plan of how you’re going to run that day and what you’re going to shoot, you know, you have that at least because everything is not going to go according to plan. When you’re shooting, all kinds of things happen. Like someone doesn’t show up or something breaks. So you just have to really be reliant on yourself and your teammates to problem solve. So everything is about problem solving. With editing if you have the luxury, sometimes it’s good to take space from your edit because it’s like writing too. You’ve seen it so many times, so many times. And then you just like I just got to get it done and I’ll get it done. But you kind of know in your gut that that’s not the answer, but you’re just going to make it happen. But sometimes if you just take a step back, take a couple of days off, a week, maybe, maybe a month if you can, you know, the answer will really come to you. 

Eric: But for that to happen, a visionary filmmaker still needs to be open enough to where an idea can take them. 

Eileen Cabiling: Everything is a process. And I think it’s about brainstorming it first and not putting everything that you think about in stone. It should be fluid and flexible, your ideas. So if you want to write about motherhood or being single woman or if you want to write about what it was like to be in the army or about war, you know, a lot of it is just treating paper or treating your laptop as a sketch pad, because I think sometimes we tend to get scared if we put our ideas down on a piece of paper, that has to be it. And then that can be very paralyzing. But when it comes to thinking about my own themes in life, a lot of it is like just journaling about things that I care about or hearing other people’s stories or what’s happening in the world or what’s happening to me personally. Because a lot of times you may come across something like my short film where it’s like, what do I have in common with a fisherman? Right. But what did resonate with me, with the fishermen was that he was put in a situation where he’s super stuck because he has to survive. But his voice doesn’t really matter because he’s living in a system that doesn’t really support him. So I can understand that actually, or at least put part of myself in that situation, because I felt that way many times in my own context. So I think characters are so important these days as a storyteller, maybe because we’re so big now, you know. So how do we find the universal in an individual and how and it can be so, such a different individual, but what do we all still have in common? So, yeah, I believe in character sketches. I think my short film is really a character sketch. 

Eric: Research can only help turn these sketches into fully three dimensional characters in movies. 

Eileen Cabiling: I interview people a lot. So right now I am developing another film about drug rehab in the Philippines. So I’m just really interviewing a lot of people who have moved through that experience. Drug rehab is a very new thing in the Philippines. It’s a very new concept. New idea. So I’ve been really just talking to the people who’ve been moving through it and are who have been trying to create that for the Filipino people that are addicted to drugs. And then same thing. I’m writing a kid’s movie right now for another company. And I went and interviewed a lot of the kids in this world and this situation where they want the story to be told and just hung out with them. Yeah, I believe in that. I just that’s the kind of writer I am. 

Eric: And the more a filmmaker can learn about their subject, well, not only does it make the work more honest, it also means the storyteller doesn’t have to create as much out of thin air. 

Eileen Cabiling: Whatever you can do to get inspired to create. Right. And a lot of people, at least for me and I know a lot of my colleagues. It doesn’t come from just me. And I think that’s the same thing when you make a piece, if you’re just making a piece all by yourself and you’re not getting input from your team or your producers or being open to being critiqued to make it better to have a conversation, and you’re kind of just making something in a fishbowl, you know what I mean? Like, by yourself. But I always feel like if you have someone that really relates with your work colleagues or producers or obviously your own team, hopefully you should be able to have dialog about your work to make it better. 

Eric: Even now, with the world still dealing with the coronavirus, artists can and must find a way to be inspired to keep creating. 

Eileen Cabiling: Well, I mean, covid is a real opportunity to be creative about how to make a film, especially as an indie filmmaker. And yes, I have been thinking about the short film format a lot during this time because I’m like, when am I going to I have a feeling to make an indie feature film, maybe another year or so. So, yeah, I’m thinking about the short film format again, and I have a couple ideas that I’m working on hoping that I can just make something this year. One is my family has all this amazing. My mother had saved all this amazing Super eight footage and I have all of it. So I think that’s an opportunity like a cattle video of your family or old videos you had just in your garage, whether it be Super Eights or VHS. And there’s footage there to make something. So there’s that. And then I find it interesting how people are making film within the Zoom format with movement. So I am talking to an old modern dance colleague of mine about creating some modern dance pieces. 

Eric: And if Eileen Cabiling didn’t have filmmaking as a creative outlet. 

Eileen Cabiling: I think I would be a painter. I think that’s how I make films and that’s how I write films. And so I love the idea of creating images and they just start to come to life with a paintbrush. But then I also have this strive to just put out questions in the world and start looking at things underneath the surface of our state of humanity, human value and human rights. That’s a big passion of mine. So, yeah, I guess there would be a way to do that through painting. 

Eric: Let’s call that a lesson for everyone. Find the canvas you need and go create something that you want to see come to life. We want to thank Eileen Cabiling for sharing her story with our students. And thanks, of course, to all of you for listening. 

This episode was based on the Q&A, moderated by Liz Hinlein. To watch the full interview or to see our other Q&As, check out our YouTube channel at YouTube.com/NewYorkFilmAcademy. This episode was written by me, Eric Conner. Edited and mixed by Kristian Heydon. Produced by Kristian Heydon, Helen Kantilaftis, and myself. Executive produced by the New York Film Academy with a special thanks to all our staff and crew who make this possible. To learn more about our programs, check us out at NYFA.edu. Be sure to subscribe on Apple podcast or wherever you listen. See you next time. 

Cobra Kai, Taken, and The Transporter Screenwriter Robert Mark Kamen

In this episode of The Backlot, we sit down with Screenwriter Robert Mark Kamen as he discusses working with Luc Besson on The Professional (Leon), The Fifth Element, Kiss of The Dragon, the Taken series, and his inspiration for and work on The Karate Kid.

Eric: Just a heads up, this episode will feature some adult language, so if there’s kids in earshot, you probably should put on headphones. 

Tova: Hi and welcome to The Backlot. I’m Tova Laiter moderator and director of the New York Film Academy Guest Lecture series. In this episode, we will take an in-depth look at one of my great guests and hear about his experience in the entertainment industry. And now Eric Conner will take you through the highlights of this Q&A. 

Eric: Hi, I’m Eric Conner, senior instructor at New York Film Academy, and in this episode, we bring you a screenwriter that well, if you haven’t quoted, someone has quoted to you. Fifth Element, Jet Li’s Kiss of the Dragon, the Taken series and of course, the still expanding world of The Karate Kid. Our guest has created them all. We are talking about screenwriter Robert Mark Kamen. I’m not sure how many writers can make this claim, but Mr. Kamen’s Hollywood career started when he sold the first draft of the first screenplay he ever wrote. 

Robert Mark Kamen: I’d never been out here before. It’s the first screenplay I ever wrote. It was one draft and I sold the screenplay. I was – I just finished my PhD at the University of Pennsylvania and I was basically just f***ing off and teaching two classes a week. And I sell a screenplay and I come out here and they drag me out here and I walk into the executive office and I’m going to meet with the head of production who was Ted Ashley at the time, and the late Mark Rosenberg, who is a vice president, and Tova was creative executive. And I go to walk in this room and I really this I’ve never had anything to do with the film business at all. And before I walk in, she comes up to me and she says, hello, my name is Tova Laiter and I’m the head of whatever. And I just want you to tell you your script is great and don’t listen to anything they say. And so I figured, OK, I won’t listen to anything they say. So I went in and they are sitting there and they all have things to say. But this woman told me not to listen to anything they say. So I left the meeting and the guy I was with, the producer, he said, So what do you think? What do you think about what they said? I said, Well, I was talking to somebody and they said not to listen to anything they said. So I don’t know because I didn’t listen. And that’s how I met Tova. About a decade later, Warner Brothers hired me to be their script assassin. So I came back on the lot to really basically make an enemy out of every person that ever wrote a script for them, because I would get the scripts before production and I’d just change them. The advice I used to give to any writer I would meet who was going into the room, I said, listen, the best advice I ever got. I said, you’re going in there. Just nod your head. Don’t listen to anything they say. And that’s how I met Tova. Thirty, thirty two years or thirty three years ago on this lot. 

Eric: Besides having the good fortune of meeting our Q&A’s moderator Tova Laiter. Mr. Kamen found himself in the unusual position of selling scripts before he really knew what the industry expected in screenplays. 

Robert Mark Kamen: For the first year I wrote screenplays I didn’t know there were three acts in a screenplay. Jeffrey Katzenberg had to tell me there were three acts. I thought, I was like Shakespeare, five acts. OK, I’ll do that. I once took a course with Robert McKee. Gee, McKee, whatever his name is. Is anybody he related to Robert McKee? This guy is so full of s***. He takes the entire creative out of the process. There is no such thing as a formula. I mean, they’re all formula, it’s all formulaic. You know, films are all formulaic and stuff, but there is no such thing as a formula. You know, everybody who says, oh, on page forty five, this should happen on page forty five. No, this is all supposed to come from you, you’re supposed to see a film. You’re supposed to tell a story, you’re supposed to be a storyteller. And if you can’t tell a story that’s going to engage people by making it go up and down and up and down and up and down, go to law school. 

Eric: Mr. Kamen’s point is clear. Screenwriters should not be led by page counts, but rather by their own instincts. 

Robert Mark Kamen: Writing is having the ability to sit still, sit down, and sooner or later something’s going to happen. I organize myself, when I have an idea for a film, it’s just kind of a general feeling and idea. And I write an outline and the outlines just kind of start growing and growing. I just handed in an outline that was twenty four pages long. It’s kind of like add water and you have a script and I write an outline and the more I write the outline, I write it over and over and over and over. And the more I write it, the clearer the film becomes and I write it in screenplay form. First I write notes and then I write it in screenplay form. Interior, exterior, and I just describe in narrative what is going on in the scene. And then I’ll write the outline again and maybe there will be a bit of dialog in it. And then I’ll write the outline again until I have a beginning, middle and end. And you can read it. You can actually see the film. You see the film. You can read the screenplay and see the film. And then it’s just writing. And sometimes it changes in the writing, sometimes it doesn’t change in the writing, but then you just sort of fill it out. And that’s how I get a feel for things. And if the outlines don’t work, the scripts usually don’t work. 

Eric: Mr. Kamen stressed that despite his many successes, the process of writing doesn’t guarantee him a home run every time he’s at bat. If today’s work doesn’t go well… 

Robert Mark Kamen: Tomorrow’s another day. Here’s how I plan my day. I wake up and I plan what’s for dinner and I don’t think anything beyond that. And if I have a successful dinner, I’ve had a successful day. Seriously, once I know what I’m drinking and I’m eating, I’m good to go. As a writer, you’re going to have days that are s*** that just nothing is working. But then there’s tomorrow. And then if it’s not working, put it aside. Write something else. And you have to deal with, if you’re in this business, with rejection. And that’s the thing you have to really learn how to absorb because the whole business is all about rejection. And if you don’t learn how to deal with rejection, you’re going to have a short, unhappy career because you’ll either kill the executives and be famous for that or you won’t be able to bear it. 

Eric: Mr. Kamen explained that a big part of succeeding in this industry is facing failure, either externally from others saying no or internally when you read your own pages and think this sucks. In both cases, you have to work like heck to get past it. 

Robert Mark Kamen: You have to keep constantly going back. All writing is rewriting. You probably heard this before. All writing is rewriting. You have to go back and back and back every night after I come home from my wonderful dinner, every night that I’ve planned since breakfast, I sit down and I reread what I wrote that day and sometimes I’ll change it, sometimes I won’t. But when you’re writing, it’s always with you. I mean, you can’t – it’s so hard to divorce the inner voice from the outer voice. There’s always a program running and the program running, whether it’s conscious or not, is that script you’re writing, that thing you’re writing, the voice you’re hearing. And so you’re constantly going back to it, you don’t have a choice. And as you go back to it, you’re rewriting and you’re perfecting and you’re refining it until you can’t do it anymore and then you have to give it to somebody to read to tell you it’s a piece of s*** or not, or I really like it. But you have to find somebody who is critical and harsh and and everything else. The problem with that is that if you find somebody like me, I’m too busy to read your piece of s***. I’m busy with my own piece of s***. So you really have to find somebody who you respect and whose opinion you respect, not like give it to your mom. You know, it’s like, hey, mom, what do you think? Oh, god, you’re a genius. But you have to find somebody when you lose perspective to talk to. This is why more and more people have writing teams so they can bounce things off each other. 

Eric: Though Mr. Kamen understands the importance of having people to run ideas by, he still views himself as more of a solo warrior when it comes to writing. One who prefers to not even be on the sets of his own movies. 

Robert Mark Kamen: I don’t like being on set. I’m happiest when I’m being left alone and I’m writing. And when you’re on set, you’re mostly hanging around and you’re at the mercy of a director and you’re at the mercy of the actors. And actors are human impersonators. So what they do is they impersonate your best friend and they look at you like you are the only person in the world. And until you get hip to it, you think they really are when in reality all they want is more dialog. So I try to stay away as much as possible from set. And with screenwriting, you don’t have to talk to anybody. You don’t have to talk to actors. You don’t have to talk to technicians. You don’t talk to cameramen. You don’t to talk to grips. You don’t have to talk to set decorators. And you’ve got to really like talking to people. And I like talking to people for dinner an hour and a half and after an hour and a half, I’m I’m ready to go home and be by myself. 

Eric: Just don’t call him antisocial. 

Robert Mark Kamen: I’m not antisocial. I’m shortly social. I’m very social, but for short periods of time. 

Eric: Speaking of short periods of time, Mr. Kamen’s adamant about how little time a screenwriter has in their stories to hook their audience. 

Robert Mark Kamen: The idea of any of these movies is you have to hook your audience into the character in the first 10 minutes. Otherwise, they’re looking at their Blackberries. No, not Blackberries, iPhones. And so if you’ll notice in this film [Taken], nothing happens for the first twenty two minutes of the film. Nothing. You know, he’s not getting along with the daughter. He has a bunch of friends. They’re grilling steaks. He buys her a thing, the stepfather buys her a horse. Nothing happens until she gets taken. And once she gets taken, the movie never stops. But you’re sitting in the movie and the first 10 minutes, you feel bad for this guy. Nothing is working out for him. He lives in a s****y little apartment. He has these friends who drink cheap wine and grill steaks. His daughter lives on a big estate. Her stepfather buys her a horse. Nothing’s going right for this guy until the action starts. But you’re hooked into the guy. I just had this meeting with, what’s his name, Steve Levinson. And we have this project and we’re talking. And they said, well, what’s your idea? I said, my idea is to make you either really like the guy in the first 10 minutes or really not like the guy. And they said, which one is it? And I said, it doesn’t much matter. If you like him, you’re going to root for him and go along. And if you don’t like him, you’re not going to like him and then at the end of the movie, he’s transformed and you end up liking him. I said, so it doesn’t matter. So you pick whichever one you want and they said, you don’t have a point of view? And I said, no, I’m a working writer. I don’t have a point of view. Whoever signs my check, that’s my point of view. I’m being flippant about it. But I’ve been doing this for thirty two years now and you learn that your point of view in movies, it cannot be inflexible because a movie is not like a novel. A movie is a collaborative effort and everybody has an idea. And your job as a writer is to take all these ideas, all these things and make them sort of like everybody has to get on board. So you have to make it so that your vision becomes their vision and their vision becomes your vision until you can give them the script that they can f*** up. But once once you give them the document, it’s their problem. I think it’s why I’ve been able to continue doing this is that reason. 

Tova: You have been collaborating with Luc Besson very successfully in the last what, 10 years? 

Robert Mark Kamen: 17 years. 

Tova: Really? 

Eric: In case you don’t know, Luc Besson is the acclaimed director behind La Femme Nikita, The Professional, a.k.a. Leon, and The Fifth Element, as well as the mega producer of Colombiana, the Taken and Transporter franchises. His collaboration with Robert Kamen has produced one hit after another, but they did not start off on the best foot. 

Robert Mark Kamen: Luc and I met on the Warner Brothers lot when I was here being script assassin in Billy Gerber’s office. Bill Gerber, he’s now Bill Gerber because he’s over 50. He was a vice president here and he called me up one day. He said, we have a script. It doesn’t make any sense. But the guy who did it is very talented and we’d like to be in business with him. He’s a French director named Luc Besson. Who knew who Luc Besson was? He did this film called La Femme Nikita. Look at the film and read the script. So I read the script and it did make no sense. And I watched the film and the film was breathtaking. It was amazing. And I said, I want to, I want to be in business with this guy. So Billy said, well, he’s going to be here, come in and talk to him about his script. So I came in and for forty five minutes I told this French auteur everything that was wrong with his script, you know, not meaning to destroy the script, but I’m trying to tell him, you know, how it would work. In the process I had no cultural dissonance whatsoever and completely forgot this is a French auteur. If he has an idea, it’s a great idea because he had the idea and I proceeded to just go on and on and on. At the end of the meeting, I walk out, the phone rings. Five minutes later, it’s Billy. He said, you will never have a relationship with this person and neither will we. He just got up and walked out of the room. I said, OK, well, you know, and won’t be the first time my mouth got me in trouble, it won’t be the last time. A week later, I’m sitting in New York at my desk and my phone rings. Hello, this is Luc. He said, I thought about what you said. I said, Yeah. He said, you’re right. I want you to come work with me on the script. He said, I already cleared it with Billy. There’s a plane ticket waiting for you at the airport for tomorrow night, just like in the movies. I said, where’s it to? He said to Paris. 

Eric: As a lover of cuisine and wine, in fact he has his own vineyard, Mr. Kamen could not be more excited about going to France on the studio’s dime. However, he was in for a rude awakening. 

Robert Mark Kamen: So I’m going to Paris. I’m going to be with this guy whose film I really love. We’re going to work. I’m going for three days and I’ll go have some great meals with him and it’s going to be great and get on the airplane, I get off in Paris. There’s Luc with two motorcycle helmets. It’s January. You know, I’m used to Warner Brothers. They send the limo. He gives my bag to somebody. I get on the back of a motorcycle. I hate motorcycles and it’s f***ing freezing. And I have on my Armani leather jacket, of course, and he takes me to this place that was his studio. It was a 19th century foundry with beautiful skylights. It was unheated. It’s all made out of metal and glass. So it’s freezing. And he says, first we’ll eat lunch. And I say, fantastic. He takes out two frozen meals. He puts them in a toaster oven. He heats up the most inedible s***. He takes out a hunk of cheese and we eat this. It wasn’t garbage. It was just frozen food. It was like, horrible. So I eat this and I’m saying, OK, whatever. And he says, Now I want to show you something. He takes me upstairs and he opens these two doors and it’s a warehouse, huge warehouse. And in the warehouse is every single thing to make The Fifth Element. Everything, all the monsters, all the creatures, all the Gaultier costumes on racks, all of them made. He has invested over four million dollars in all the stuff for the movie. He had a vision and this is who he is. He had a vision of what the movie is. He just didn’t have a story. He had a story, but it didn’t make any sense. Well, you know, in the spaceship, and the car comes in, then it goes and then we have the tiger and it’s really funny. And then they come in and then they kiss and it’s great. For one hundred sixty pages and it makes no sense. But when I saw all this stuff, I said, well, it makes perfect sense. Now all you need is a script. And he said, yes, that’s why you’re here, let’s go to work. I said, where are we going to work? He takes out a heater, a space heater, and we put it down and we put a pad between us. And we sat that way for five hours. The only heat in the room was that. And we wrote and wrote and wrote. I was supposed to be there for three days. I stayed for three weeks. I can’t tell you how poorly I ate in Paris. I’m in Paris. He doesn’t drink wine. He doesn’t eat oysters, doesn’t smoke cigarets, doesn’t drink coffee. But for three weeks we work. And I mean, I was there with one suitcase of clothes and I was just every night I’m sending out the same pair of jeans to the laundry in the hotel. At the end of three weeks, we finished the script and tonight we’re going to have a meal at Zaman. Zaman was the restaurant of the moment in Paris. Joel Robuchon’s first restaurant. Joel Robuchon was the chef of the moment. I was so excited. Picks me up on the motorcycle. We go to Zaman, we pull up to the front of the restaurant, and then he pulls around to the back and we go in through the back door. And our meal at Zaman consisted of sitting in the kitchen with Robuchon and he would cook something, put it on a plate and give it to us and a big pot of mashed potatoes, which Luc has a softness for because they’re full of butter. And that was how I met this guy. We worked on this script for four years. On and off, on and off. The final draft was done as his second daughter was born. He was – literally the baby was being born here. I’m outside the delivery room and he’s coming in and out and we’re checking pages really, really and truly. And that’s how I met Luc. 

Eric: The Fifth Element plays like Blade Runner on speed and 20 years later remains one of the craziest big budget sci fi movies ever made. It also introduced much of the world to the manic comedic energy of Chris Tucker. 

Clip [00:18:16] [Clip from The Fifth Element]

Robert Mark Kamen: All those dialogs, those screwy dialogs. Luc, his English is, he can speak well, he can’t write, but his idea would, he’d say something like make him crazy, you know, make him say crazy s***. And so I’d write a bunch of crazy s*** and I’d read it to him and I’d say, no, no, no different crazy s***. And I’d write some different stuff. And it’s a no, not until we get it right. And then he always saw the character. He said he speaks like jazz. So keep that in your mind that he speaks like jazz. That was no help. But if you watch the film, he speaks like jazz. So he’s riffing. He’s always short. Tacky, kind of like that. 

Clip [00:19:11] [Clip from The Fifth Element]

Eric: For Luc Besson and Robert Mark Kamen, The Fifth Element was the beginning of a beautiful friendship, though not one without its share of bumps along the way and one massive falling out. 

Robert Mark Kamen: The Fifth Element, it was great, was wonderful. In the course of it, what happened was he couldn’t get enough money to make it, so he had to put it off. And I’m sitting in his office one day and I pick up the script and I read it. It’s called Leon and I read this script. And it’s fantastic. It’s just great. It’s just it’s a little off, but it’s great. And I said, Luc, I said I’d work on this. Is this set up? He said, no, nobody will make it. I said, well, if you do this and you do this and you do this and you don’t kill the girl at the end, and the 12 year old doesn’t sleep with a 30 year old guy, the thing could be really good. I’ll work on this for nothing. And I couldn’t work on it officially because I was working for Warners, etc, etc. So I work on it. It becomes The Professional. 

Clip [00:20:06] [Trailer for The Professional]

Robert Mark Kamen: Everything, The Professional comes, it’s great. It’s a real cult movie. Everybody loves the professional. The Fifth Element comes out. Fifth Element, of course, is like classic movie now. And as a matter of fact, a film crew came up to my house yesterday up in Sonoma to interview me about The Fifth Element because they’re putting on a series on AMC about directors and these iconic movies and he won’t talk to them, so they came to see me. So all this happens, the fifth element comes out. It’s great. He calls me up and we’re living in a house in Beverly Hills up on the bird streets myself, my wife, my two year old, his two year old. And we lived this way for months. And we’re so, so close. We’re so close. He calls me up. He said, I have our next film. I said, great. And he tells me what it is I said, I don’t want to do it. I said, it doesn’t make any sense. And it just it’s stupid, Luc. I don’t want to do it. And he stops talking to me for a year and a half. He doesn’t return my phone calls. He doesn’t answer the invitation for my fiftieth birthday and nothing for a year after talking every day for four years. And I can’t reach him. You call his assistant, he never returns phone calls. 

Eric: Thankfully for the cinematic world and for the future bank accounts of Jason Statham and Liam Neeson, that was not the end of their relationship. 

Robert Mark Kamen:  About two weeks before 9/11, I think it was, I get a phone call from Luc. I’m coming to New York. I want to have breakfast with you. And I said, oh, great. He’s finally came to his senses. We’re going to make up, this is kiss and make up. It’s great. I go to the house to have breakfast with them. He’s sitting there, same look on his face. And he outlines to me this vision said, I don’t want to work for Hollywood studios. Bruce Willis drove me crazy. I don’t want to work with movie stars. I want to make my own. Here’s what I want to do. I want to build a studio in Paris, soundstages, film school, everything. And here’s what I want to do. I want to have my own production company. I want us to write together. We’re going to write low impact action movies, meaning no CGI. I’m going to finance them. I’ll finance the first two or three with the money I make from them. We’ll make some more with the money I make from that, I’m going to buy libraries with the libraries. I’ll have regular income with regular income, regular flow of income and cash flow. I will take my company onto the stock market. I will go public. I will raise three hundred and thirty five million euro. I will go to the bank. I will get this. I will, I will build a film studio and he’s going on and on and I said, great. He said, and I want you to do this with me. I want you to write these movies. I said, Yeah, except you have to apologize to me. He said, Why? I said, Because you hurt my feelings. And he said, no. I said, no, you won’t apologize. He said, no, you hurt my feelings. I said, you stopped talking to me for a year and a half. And he said, yes, because you hurt my feelings. And I said, So you want me to apologize to you? And he just sat there with this look on his face. I said, Well, that’s crazy, because if I asked you to direct a film and you don’t want to direct a film, my feelings wouldn’t be hurt. And he just looked at me and I said, well, I’m not going to do this unless you apologize. And he looked at me and then he said, OK, I apologize. And I said, So how do you want to do this? He said, We’re leaving for the airport in two hours. We’re taking a flight to L.A.. You’re kidding. He said, yes, come on, we’ll go home, you’ll get a bag and we’ll go to L.A.. What are we doing in L.A.? We’re going to meet with Jet Li. I said for what? He said, well, we’re going to have this film and we’re going to pitch it to him and he’s going to say yes and I’m going to finance it. I said, What’s the film? He said, We’ll make it up on the airplane. And I have learned with Luc that, you know, I’m like beyond that already. So I go home, I put some stuff in the case. We go to the airport, we get on a plane in five hours, we get off the plane and we have the outline for Kiss of the Dragon. 

Clip [00:23:59] [Trailer for Kiss of the Dragon]

Robert Mark Kamen: We come to Fox, there’s Jet Li in a room, he speaks no English at the time, like four words and I pitch him the film and he doesn’t understand what I’m saying. And there’s a translator there and he’s translating. And at the end, he says, OK, that’s the end of it. Six months later, we were in production. 

Eric: Robert Kamen didn’t even need a cross-country flight to come up with The Transporter. Just an ad on a truck. 

Robert Mark Kamen: We’re sitting on a bench in Paris eating ham sandwiches from our favorite ham shop, and we’re sitting there right along the Seine, the Eiffel Tower is very, looks like a Woody Allen movie. And a truck goes by and it says transporter. And we’re trying to think of what, we want to make our own action hero. We don’t want a Hollywood action hero. And it goes by. And I said, oh, there’s the movie. It’s about a guy who transports stuff. He never ask what’s in the package, and he transports stuff in a Mercedes Benz. And Luc says, I don’t like it. I said, Why? He says, well transporter is a moving man. It was a moving van. I said, Yeah, but this guy drives a Mercedes and I don’t like it. And we dropped it and we kept talking. And we’re talking about doing this film, Banditos, and we’re talking about all the stuff. Two weeks later, he calls me up. He says, I have the idea. I said, what’s the idea? He said, there’s a guy and he transports things in the trunk of his BMW and he never opens the – I said, that’s my idea. He said, No, no, you said Mercedes. That’s my relationship with Luc. That’s exactly my relationship with Luc. And it’s been that way for 17 years. And I brought this up with him the other day. I said, you know, it felt you never really meant the apology. And he said because you were the one that should apologize to me. And I said, You’re kidding. Why didn’t you say anything? He said, because I wanted you to write the films. This is 17 years later. And that’s my relationship with him where I adore this guy. He’s one of the geniuses of cinema, right or wrong, he’s always right for him. And he doesn’t care what anybody thinks about his movies. He will make a movie because he wants to, not because he thinks it’s going to be a box office success. He’s made some really weird movies in the last couple of years because he’s personally excited about them and doesn’t care if they’re successful or not. He follows his own. I don’t know what, his own cheese, his own Camembert, I don’t know. But but he is truly a genius and has managed to forge this very unique, iconoclastic career completely out of the system. 

Eric: Once they got their apology straightened out, Luc Besson and Robert Mark Kamen, were able to create several movies together on their own terms. 

Robert Mark Kamen: We don’t develop. Luc and I do not develop. What we do is we come up with an idea, we write the script or I write the script and then he edits and then he goes and shoots the film. And once he shoots the film, he comes to Hollywood and says, you want this or you don’t want it. He goes to usually goes to Fox every once in a while, goes into the studio and says, here’s the film, take it or leave it. It’s already paid for. All you have to do is buy it and you can have these territories. He never goes to any studio for money so we can do whatever the f*** we want. And if you would have seen the R rated version of Taken, oh, there were needles in people’s arms. There were well, there was stuff, there was lots of stuff. 

Eric: And if they produced Taken fully within Hollywood, the audience never would have had Liam Neeson with those particular set of skills. 

Clip [00:27:44] [Clip from Taken]

Robert Mark Kamen: Fox didn’t want him, and Fox said, we don’t want this, we won’t support this, we won’t do this. And Luc said, OK, fine. And he went and made the film and they thought that was brilliant. And then they said, OK and brilliant. It gave Liam a giant career. I mean, giant career. 

Eric: Robert Mark Kamen also knows how to use his words on the page to inspire some amazing action scenes. 

Robert Mark Kamen: If you’ve been doing action scenes as long as I’ve been doing action scenes, you understand that an action set piece is like a little movie in itself. It has three acts, a beginning, a middle and an end. And if you look at it that way, then you can write it and then you think of what kind of things can be done. Well, just about anything can be done. But you write that stuff and then the director will or the action director, the stunt guys, the stunt coordinator, they will make it happen. And if they can’t make that happen, they will do something approximating it. But if you write it in beats where the hero’s winning, now he has a problem. Now it looks like it’s so not bad. You go into the second act. He’s trying to figure out his problem. It looks like he’s going to win. All of a sudden, all the s*** hits the fan. He’s losing, losing, losing. He turns around, he finds out one thing to make a win and then bang. If you do that, they’ll fill in the other stuff, you know, it’s like if you have a screenplay and you know, it’s about the Russian Revolution, you can write the Russian army charges and say, here, get six hundred thousand horses, six hundred thousand Cossacks and swords. But for action scenes, you plot them out like a screenplay in three acts. 

Eric: His experience also means he can just as seamlessly jump into other franchises midstream and still capture their voice. 

Robert Mark Kamen: I love writing sequelized films, especially if I start the first one I wrote Lethal Weapon two and three. I just didn’t get credit on two because I worked at the Warner Brothers lot at the time and I just fixed stuff up. The line, they f*** you at the drive thru. If you’re writing the second or third part of something, you have to stay true to the voice of the first one, because if they’re making a sequel, that means the first one worked and so you can’t go off and change the character. The Batman movies are a perfect example. The Dark Knight, Chris Nolan threw out the whole notion of what it was before, and he gave his Batman a particular point of view and a particular voice. And it has never changed through any of the Batmans. So if you come in in the middle of something, you have to keep the voice and the idea and the philosophy of that being consistent. Even if you take Batman to Mars, he still has to have the same drives, same insecurities, the same needs, the same flaws. With Mel and Danny, it was really easy because it was Laurel and Hardy. 

Eric: Of all of Mr. Kamen’s triumphs, the neatest trick might have been making us all care about a bullied high school kid learning karate from his apartment’s handyman. 

Clip [00:30:41] [Clip from The Karate Kid]

Robert Mark Kamen: I started writing The Karate Kid the day my daughter Ally was born, which was June 13th, 1982. And I finished it September 13th, 1982. And it was made in October of 1983. It took me three months to write the script and then I rewrote it and that took me six weeks and that was it. It was kind of very loosely based on my teacher who was an Okinawan guy. He didn’t speak English and he he didn’t make funny jokes, but he taught by example, you know, kind of like if you wanted to know what a punch in the mouth felt like, he’d punch you in the mouth. And I wanted to – it was kind of my homage to my teacher because he turned me in from a 90 pound weakling into ninety five pound weakling. 

Eric: A movie that only took a few months to write spawned three sequels, a Saturday morning cartoon, a remake, and now three seasons of Cobra Kai, the meta reimagining from the bully’s POV. So how can newer writers have a hope of creating work with this kind of staying power? 

Robert Mark Kamen: Always write what you know, but mostly always write from your heart and then you can’t go wrong. I tell this to everybody. I mean, there’s a lot of stuff that is not from people’s hearts and a lot of guys go to film school and do this. But you can’t go wrong if you write something you’re passionate about. And if you try to write something that looks like everything else, it’s going to come out like everything else. But if you want to break in, you have to give them something different and then let them turn it into something that’s like everything else. It’s true, but start with something that’s different. Don’t don’t try to copy anything else. I unfortunately, copy everything else. I just try to make it a little different. But you can do that after you’ve sold a dozen films. 

Eric: Which I hope is awaiting all of you. We want to thank this episode’s sensei, Robert Mark Kamen, for sharing his Hollywood story with our students. And thanks to all of you for listening. 

This episode was based on the Q&A, moderated and curated by Tova Laiter. To watch the full interview or to see our other Q&A, check out our YouTube channel at YouTube.com/NewYorkFilmAcademy. This episode was written by me, Eric Conner. Edited and mixed by Kristian Heydon. Produced by Kristian Heydon, Helen Kantilaftis, and myself. Executive produced by the New York Film Academy. A special thanks to all our staff and crew who made this possible. To learn more about our programs. Check us out at NYFA.edu. Be sure to subscribe on Apple podcasts or wherever you listen. See you next time.